Metrics That Matter

Yesterday I was scrolling through Instagram and came across a profile that made me stop in my tracks. Gorgeous photos, thousands of likes, hundreds of comments, and more than 20,000 followers.

On top of all that? This profile belongs to someone who does what I do. Ugh.

I’ll be honest, I wallowed for a minute. How am I ever supposed to compete with that kind of social media cred?

Fortunately, I don’t have to.

Here’s a knowledge 💣 for you:

It doesn’t matter how many

Followers you have

Likes you get

Comments are made

None of those numbers are a true measure of your business success.

We call those numbers vanity metrics, because they make you feel good about yourself but they don’t actually do anything for your business.

Yes, that profile I saw was doing very well by the numbers and maybe even behind the scenes, too.

But their success does not diminish mine, and those numbers are just numbers.

While it can be very tempting to seek out a massive following, that only matters if those followers buy into your business.

The metrics that matter are the ones that tell you the success of your business. How many people clicked on that link in your Facebook ad? How many people bought your program? How many people are engaging with your posts by responding to your questions and asking their own?

Those are numbers you can control and I’m about to tell you how.

There are a lot of things that don’t matter now that we used to think were important… High school popularity 👯, how many CD’s 💿 we owned, worrying whether a word was spelled correctly in an email (thanks, autocorrect!).

Vanity metrics are kinda like that.

When social media first started, having a huge number of followers was A Big Deal. It made a person or business look important.

Now? Not so much. Most of us recognize that there are lots of bot and spam accounts, and that a ton of followers doesn’t necessarily equate to a ton of sales.

You know what does matter? Metrics that have a direct correlation to sales.

If you’re not sure what those are, don’t worry, I can help with that 😉

You can boost your engagement rate by engaging with your followers on any platform. Ask for questions or opinions in your posts, and respond to the followers who are engaged. Follow your target customers and engage with their posts.

Conversion Rate/Click-Through Rate

Your conversion rate is the percentage of followers who take a desired action on your content. In order to study conversion rate, you need a Call-To-Action (CTA) for your followers. This is usually a link for them to click, which you can then measure. Conversion rate varies across platforms. According to this article by Adweek, “social media traffic has an average conversion rate of 0.71 percent, which is very small compared with search’s 1.95 percent and email’s 3.19 percent.”

Bounce Rate

This is the rate that people click the link to your site, hang out for a sec, then immediately bounce on outta there. This number is important because it means that you had a strong CTA but a weak landing page.

Shares

This one can be debatable, but I think that the number of times your content is shared is useful because it tells you what type of content resonates with your followers, and allows you to replicate it in the future. Any data that gives you customer insights is useful.